Oracle Announces General Availability of Oracle Database 12c, the First Database Designed for the Cloud

REDWOOD SHORES, Calif. – July 1, 2013

News Summary

As organizations embrace the cloud, they seek technologies that will transform business and improve their overall operational agility and effectiveness. Oracle Database 12c is a next-generation database designed to meet these needs, providing a new multitenant architecture on top of a fast, scalable, reliable, and secure database platform. By plugging into the cloud with Oracle Database 12c, customers can improve the quality and performance of applications, save time with maximum availability architecture and storage management and simplify database consolidation by managing hundreds of databases as one.

News Facts

Oracle Database 12c introduces a new multitenant architecture that simplifies the process of consolidating databases onto the cloud; enabling customers to manage many databases as one – without changing their applications.

The foundation of Oracle Public Cloud Services, Oracle Database 12c can greatly benefit customers deploying private database clouds and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) vendors looking for the power of Oracle Database in a secure multitenant model.

Oracle Database 12c, optimized on SPARC and Intel® Xeon® processors, is a major release. It introduces 500 additional features and is the result of 2,500 person-years of development and 1.2 million hours of testing, plus an extensive beta program with Oracle’s customers and partners.

Oracle Database 12c is also co-engineered with Oracle’s world record setting SPARC T5 servers.

New Multitenant Architecture for Database Consolidation on the Cloud

Oracle Database 12c addresses the key challenges of customers who are consolidating databases in a private cloud model by enabling greatly improved efficiency and lower management costs, while retaining the autonomy of separate databases.

Oracle Multitenant is a new feature of Oracle Database 12c, and allows each database plugged into the new multitenant architecture to look and feel like a standard Oracle Database to applications; so existing applications can run unchanged.

By supporting multi-tenancy in the database tier, rather than the application tier, Oracle Multitenant makes all ISV applications that run on the Oracle Database ready for SaaS.

Oracle Multitenant manages many databases as one and can increase server resource utilization and reduce the time and effort required for database upgrades, backup, recovery, and much more.

The multitenant architecture provides virtually instantaneous provisioning and cloning of databases, which makes it an ideal platform for database test and development clouds.

Using smart compression and storage tiering, Database Administrators can easily define server managed policies to automatically compress and tier OLTP, Data Warehouse and Archive data based on the activity and age of data.

Defense in Depth Security

New Redaction capabilities allow organizations to protect sensitive data such as credit card numbers displayed in applications - without changes to most applications. Sensitive data is redacted at run-time based on pre-defined policies and account session information.

Oracle Database 12c also includes new Run-Time Privilege Analysis, enabling organizations to identify privileges and roles actually being used, helping revoke unnecessary privileges and enforce least privilege with confidence that business operations will not be disrupted.

Maximum Availability for Database Clouds

Oracle Database 12c introduces several high availability features, as well as enhancements to existing technologies that enable continuous access to enterprise data.

Data scientists can better analyze enterprise information and Big Data with new in-database predictive algorithms and with further integration of open-source R with Oracle Database 12c.

Supporting Quotes

“The innovations in Oracle Database 12c were developed with our customers’ cloud requirements very much in mind,” said Andrew Mendelsohn, senior vice president, Database Server Technologies, Oracle. “The new multitenant architecture makes it easier for customers to consolidate their databases and securely manage many as one. It also offers customers other capabilities for cloud computing such as simplified provisioning, cloning and resource prioritization without resorting to major application changes.”

“Oracle's User Group Communities actively participated in the development and testing of Oracle Database 12c,” said Michelle Malcher, President of the Independent Oracle Users Group (IOUG). “We are delighted to see across the board enhancements, and the new architecture will make it so much easier for customers to consolidate their databases onto the cloud.”

“A key challenge facing enterprise data center managers today is the cost, complexity, and inflexibility represented by the large numbers of production databases operating in fixed server configurations, most of which are substantially underutilized,” said Carl Olofson, Research Vice President for Database Management and Data Integration software research at IDC. “It is in the nature of most enterprise database server software that those databases cannot be moved about or redeployed easily, and attempting to combine them through consolidation raises other manageability and complexity challenges for database administrators. Oracle Database 12c offers an elegant solution to this problem that not only enables deployment flexibility and eases the administration of multiple databases, but does so in a way that requires neither changes to applications nor a steep learning curve for DBAs. It also sets up the data center well for any move in the direction of Cloud Computing.”